‘Blue’ movie hot in Cannes, but now a backlash

Adele Exarchopoulos, left, and Lea Seydoux in Abdellatif Kechiche’s controversial movie ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’.
Photo: New York Times

by
Elaine Sciolino

Last month, the film Blue Is the Warmest Color was the toast of Cannes, a drama about young lesbian love so celebrated for its explicit sex scenes that it won the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.

This month, it is being castigated for those very same scenes.

On the Riviera in May, the critics gushed. The graphic scenes were so magnificent, The Guardian wrote, that “they make the sex in famous movies like, say, Last Tango in Paris, look supercilious and dated".

The Hollywood Reporter said the film would surely “raise eyebrows with its ­show-stopping scenes of non-simulated female copulation".

Baz Bamigboye, a critic from the Daily Mail, meanwhile, confessed that he blushed like he had never blushed before, calling the sex scenes exceptionally beautiful.

“And I’m not just saying that because I’m a bloke," he added.

Now the film, directed by
Abdellatif Kechiche
, is the subject of a multifaceted international debate posing two ­questions: how to represent the female body and ­lesbian sex on screen? And who has the right, or at least the authority, to create those images?

The debate was set off when Julie Maroh, the 27-year-old author of Le Bleu Est une ­Couleur Chaude, the comic book-novel on which the film is based, criticised the film’s portrayal of lesbian sex as uninformed, unconvincing and pornographic.

Noting that the director and actresses were “all straight, unless proven otherwise", she said that, with few ­exceptions, the film struck her as “a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, ­of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn".

Even worse, she said, “everyone was ­giggling". Heterosexual viewers “laughed because they don’t understand it and find the scene ridiculous".

“The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing, and find it ridiculous," she continued. “And among the only people we didn’t hear giggling were [the] guys too busy feasting their eyes on an ­incarnation of their fantasies on screen."

Flawless beauty

Although there was not a strict divide between male and female reviewers, some female critics have joined the debate, faulting the film for its idealisation of naked female bodies in bed. “The movie feels far more about Mr Kechiche’s desires than ­anything else," The New York Times’ film critic
Manohla Dargis
wrote in a report from Cannes.

In a telephone interview, Amy Taubin, a member of the selection committee for the New York Film Festival and a contributing editor for Film Critic Magazine, said: “They are exquisitely lit actresses pretending to have sex. They are made to look ridiculously, flawlessly beautiful.

“The film is extremely voyeuristic," she added.

Female commentators on the popular portrayal of women’s sexuality acknowledge the difficulty of realistically depicting lesbian sex on the big screen.

“A heterosexual male is never going to film two women except in his fantasies," said Sophie Bramly, an author, film producer and founder of the website SecondSexe, which promotes women’s sexual pleasure.

Echoing Maroh’s comments, she said of Kechiche: “What does he know about lesbians? And how can you ask two actresses who are not lesbians to play any scene that is something other than his fantasies?"

As for the sex scenes, not all of it was as real as it seemed to many. Both 19-year-old
Adèle Exarchopoulos
, who plays the younger Adèle, and
Léa Seydoux
, 25, who plays the more experienced Emma, use their flawless bodies to embrace, writhe, scissor and do other things on screen.

But was it all real? Not really.

When a reporter for the free New York newspaper Metro spoke to Seydoux of “several unsimulated sex scenes", she interrupted and corrected him.

“Be careful," she said. “They are simulated. We were wearing prostheses. Come on, you saw the scenes! But it was only a small protection. It doesn’t really change much." (She did not explain what the prostheses were.)

Trick of the light

“What I was trying to do when we were shooting these scenes was to film what I found beautiful," he said. “So we shot them like paintings, like sculptures. We spent a lot of time lighting them to ensure they would look beautiful; after, the innate choreography of the loving bodies took care of the rest, very naturally."

The book, which won several prizes after its publication in 2011, will be published in English later this year as Blue Angel by the Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver, British Columbia. The film will be released in France in October; Sundance Selects has bought the movie for distribution in the United States, but the release date has not been announced.

In Australia, Transmission Films has picked up local distribution rights but again, there is no release date as yet.

In declining an interview request, Maroh emailed, “I do not intend to feed the buzz".

There may be a personal reason she reacted so negatively to the film. In her ­communiqué, she said Kechiche had never invited her to the set or responded to several emails, and she sarcastically criticised him for failing to acknowledge her contribution when he won the prize. “I deeply wish to thank all those who appeared surprised, shocked, disgusted with the fact that Kechiche had no words for me when he received his Palme," she wrote.

Same-sex synergy

The Cannes prize was given to Kechiche just hours after masses of French demonstrators poured into the streets of Paris to protest France’s new law allowing same-sex marriage and adoption. While it would be impossible to say whether the protests helped determine the prize at Cannes, the coincidence of the timing was noted.

Le Monde called the festival judges’ ­decision on the day of the protests “an act of cultural politics that does not lack courage". The weekly magazine Les InRockuptibles said that the festival had “intervened with a perfect sense of timing".

Kechiche told Reuters: “Everyone who is against same-sex marriage or love between two people of the same sex must see the film."

Taubin had a somewhat different take.

“If you take the sex out," she said, “no one would be interested in this movie."